In today's never stand still environment, positive customer experience has become more important than ever. As insurance becomes more commoditized, providing excellent customer service has become a key method to achieve competitive differentiation. The stakes are higher today than in the past.
Consumers have more insurer choices than ever before. At this time, insurers are facing competition not just from insurance providers but additionally non-traditional players in the field like insurtechs and banks that now provide insurance coverage. Simultaneously, customers demand more from their vendors, and they expect the interactions they have with retailers, banking institutions, insurers, doctors and service providers – every organization that they do business – to become easy, seamless, pleasant and fruitful.
It is sobering that customers are likely to switch providers of all types due to poor customer support. Reported by Forbes, NewVoiceMedia's 2021 “Serial Switchers” reports that U.S. companies are losing $75 billion running a business due to poor service. According to the research, the primary reasons customers stop using the services of a business are: They don't feel appreciated, they can't make contact with a individual who can answer their questions, employees are rude and unhelpful, they are left on hold for too long and they need to speak to multiple individuals to obtain the help they require.
Make the most of make-or-break moments
There are some decisive moments within the life insurance coverage journey when insurers have prime possibilities to delight new and existing policyholders with things to look for in the initial coverage inquiry calls an internet-based appointments with an insurer's web site to a final claim. Customers expect their policy-buying experiences to be fast and friction-free. They want their claims experiences to become uncomplicated and transparent, plus they want their customer service experiences to be pleasant, efficient and productive. And if their insurance firms disappoint or fail to deliver, potential and existing policyholders can easily place their business towards the competition. A whole lot worse, poor service can harm the brand. If the insurer consistently provides sub-par service, policyholders can voice their displeasure on social networking, and also the company can be cultivated a bad reputation.
Insurers absolutely must concentrate on optimizing customer experience across all channels and touchpoints. By utilizing customer-facing and back-end technologies, these 3 solutions help life insurers boost their customers' experience:
Offer a simple, intuitive and fast application process.
Today's online retailers have set the bar high for each customer-facing business. Because shoppers can place a web-based order and receive an item from the likes of Amazon within 2 days – or perhaps hours, in some cases – they've come to expect a similarly fast experience once they apply for insurance coverage.
However, applying for life insurance coverage is far more complicated than placing an online grocery order. Life insurance coverage shoppers typically must undergo an extensive application before they can even get a quote. Furthermore carriers need detailed health information to underwrite and properly price an insurance policy, additionally they must gather other private information like Social Security numbers, credit reports and other data that can help assess a potential insured. It is no surprise a lot of people abandon the applying process and find yourself uninsured.
Life insurers have recognized that streamlining the applying process can't only enhance the customer’s experience, but has the potential to substantially boost sales. Historically, this meant life insurers needed to increase their exposure and risk to provide a less onerous onboarding experience. Today, however, technology enables life insurers to optimize the applying process, not just facilitating application completion but also ensuring appropriate risk assignment.
With SE2 Digital Direct Life, for instance, carriers have the means to offer suitable products with a no-touch online application process that lets consumers nearly effortlessly make an application for life insurance coverage while better assigning risk and more accurately pricing policies. Digital Direct Life automates policy application by gathering key identifiers as well as an eSignature to authorize the carrier to gain access to the personal data, including the applicant's medical and credit histories and driving record. The machine then uses the information to do an automatic underwriting process to accurately assess and value risk, and will be offering the insured tailored coverage along with a speedy quote.
Transform and integrate.
In today's omni channel environment, the contact center is a still a critical touch point where a carrier has got the chance to significantly improve the relationship with customers. Insurers must give a pleasant, high-quality interaction, the account service representative (ASR) should be in a position to resolve issues quickly and effectively and reps must inspire policyholder trust and confidence that advice and information is accurate. If carriers provide anything under superior service with every contact center interaction, they risk disappointing – and potentially losing – their policyholders.
A decade or even more ago, insureds would contact their agent or call their insurance company with all kinds of requests, ranging from probably the most complicated queries to requests for help with simpler tasks like changing a beneficiary or basic information on premium amounts. The simplest calls usually takes no more than a couple of minutes because reps could simply pull up a single screen to answer quick questions. Today, however, progressively more policyholders are utilizing online or phone self-service options for simple, routine queries, and many are now only calling into the contact center with the most complicated problems that require live help. To solve complex issues, contact center reps might have to pull-up info on their screen from multiple sources on a single call. This can take considerable time, potentially frustrating policyholders and creating a customer experience that's not pleasant.
A comprehensive digital contact center transformation is important for a lifetime insurers that want to optimize the phone call center. Digital not just enables self-service capabilities but gives agents the various tools to do their jobs better and much more easily deliver fast and efficient plan to policyholders. An electronic contact center strategy includes integration having a rich set of capabilities from the partner ecosystem to enable a seamless and interesting experience for both agents and customers.
Use analytics to optimize the contact center.
Speech analytics solutions give carriers insight on customer behavior by capturing the content of customer-agent interactions. An address analytics application can attach different metadata to tag the phone call, including the caller's number, the number of anything the customer is calling about and call duration. Conversations are recorded and stored in the speech analytics software after which are typically turned into transcripts that can be used in a number of ways.
- Boost ASR performance and customer service. First, the analytics can help carriers significantly improve customer service by giving reps with valuable feedback to improve competence, leading to increasingly satisfying and successful interactions with policyholders. Typically, organizations provide feedback to their agents by evaluating a small, random sample of recorded calls. With speech analytics, 100% of calls can be evaluated. Ultimately, better-monitored, -evaluated and -trained ASRs can boost an insurer's bottom line because customers might be more receptive to cross-sell and up-sell offers from a rep they trust, and policyholders are more likely to keep their business by having an insurer that will get customer support right.
- Inform self-service strategies. Insurers may also gain insights from the metadata, revealing the reasons for that policyholder call that can help improve self-service solutions and processes.
- Improve FCR. In addition, speech analytics can also improve the first-call resolution (FCR) rate by giving insurers the ability to detect whether policyholders are calling multiple times for the same issue. Although speech analytics provide ASRs with feedback regarding their call-handling performance and guidance on how to improve service and issue resolution; we've got the technology also captures insights that can drive solutions to improve FCR.
- Ensure regulatory compliance. And finally, speech analytics can help carriers go potential legal and regulatory issues by flagging potential issues and handling them appropriately. Insurers can generate a speech analytics engine to detect key words like “legal action,” “fraud” and “DOL”. Any conversations which contain the flagged words are pulled for review, and a supervisor can swiftly contact policyholders and ASRs to deescalate a situation.
Even inside a heated marketplace, insurers that can provide consistently superior customer service in the contact center can grow faster and become more profitable. With so much on the line, life insurance coverage organizations absolutely must investigate how currently available contact center technologies can help them improve ASR competencies, develop their self-service capabilities and be sure an excellent customer experience.
